Sadiq Hidayat - Boof-e koor - The Blind Owl

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Sadeq Hedayat

Sadeq (or Sadegh) Hedayat (in Persian: صادق هدایت; February 17, 1903, Tehran — 4 April 1951, Paris, France) was Iran's foremost modern writer of prose fiction and short stories.

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Life

He was born to an aristocratic family and was educated at Dar ol-Fonoon (1914–1916) and the Lycée Français (French high school) in Tehran. In 1925, he was among a select few students who travelled to Europe to continue their studies. There, he initially pursued dentistry before giving this up for engineering. After four years in France and Belgium, where he befriended Sartre, who was to remain a lifelong friend, Hedayat returned to Iran where he held various jobs for short periods, before returning to Paris.
Hedayat subsequently devoted his whole life to studying Western literature and to learning and investigating Iranian history and folklore. The works of Guy de Maupassant, Anton Chekhov, Rainer Maria Rilke, Edgar Allan Poe and Franz Kafka intrigued him the most. During his short literary life span, Hedayat published a substantial number of short stories and novelettes, two historical dramas, a play, a travelogue, and a collection of satirical parodies and sketches. His writings also include numerous literary criticisms, studies in Persian folklore, and many translations from Middle Persian and French. He is credited with having brought Persian language and literature into the mainstream of international contemporary writing. There is no doubt that Hedayat was the most modern of all modern writers in Iran. Yet, for Hedayat, modernity was not just a question of scientific rationality or a pure imitation of European values.

In his later years, feeling the socio-political problems of the time, Hedayat started attacking the two major causes of Iran's decimation, the monarchy and the clergy, and through his stories he tried to impute the deafness and blindness of the nation to the abuses of these two major powers. Feeling alienated by everyone around him, especially by his peers, Hedayat's last published work, The Message of Kafka, bespeaks melancholy, desperation and a sense of doom experienced only by those subjected to discrimination and repression.

Hedayat's most enduring work is the short novel The Blind Owl of 1937. It has been called "one of the most important literary works in the Persian language" (S. A. Qudsi).[citation needed]

He ended his life by gassing himself and is buried in the Père Lachaise. Hedayat's last day and night was adapted into the short film, The Sacred and The Absurd, which was featured in the Tribeca Film Festival in 2004.

Current censorship

His work is coming under increasing attack in Europe from political Islamists, and many of his novels (Haji Aqa in particular) are no longer stocked in some French bookshops and libraries. The novels The Blind Owl and Haji Aqa were banned from the 18th Tehran International Book Fair in 2005. The Blind Owl contains a great deal of Buddhist and Hindu imagery. In Haji Aqa his characters explore the lack of meritocracy in Iran:

In order for the people to be kept in line, they must be kept hungry, needy, illiterate, and superstitious. If the grocer's child becomes literate, he not only will criticise my speech, but he will also utter words that neither you nor I will understand.... What would happen if the forage-seller's child turns out intelligent and capable—and mine, the son of a Haji, turns out lazy and foolish?

In November 2006, republication of Hedayat's work in uncensored form was banned in Iran, as part of a sweeping purge. However, surveillance of book-stalls is limited and it is apparently still possible to purchase the originals second-hand. The official website is also still online. Some material discussing the issue of censorship include:
- Item in The Guardian from November 2006
- "City Report: Tehran" from Frieze, issue 86, October 2004, discussing Iranian censorship in general
- Article by Radio Free Europe — Radio Liberty from November 2007

Works

Fiction

1930 Zendé be Gūr (Buried Alive). A collection of 9 short stories.
1931 Sāye-ye Moghol (Mongol Shadow)
1932 Sé qatré khūn (Three Drops of Blood)
1933 Sāyé Roshan (Chiaroscuro)
Alaviyeh Khanum (Madame `Alaviyeh)
Vagh Vagh Sahab (Mister Bow Wow)
1937 Būf-e Kūr (The Blind Owl)
1942 Sag-e Velgard (The Stray Dog)
1944 Velengārī (Tittle-tattle)
Ab-e Zendegi (The Elixir of Life)
1945 Hājī Āqā (Mr. Haji)
1946 Fardā (Tomorrow)
1947 Tupp-e Morvari (The Pearl Cannon)‘’
Dash Akol

Drama (1930–1946)
Parvin dokhtar-e Sāsān (Parvin, Sassan's Daughter)
Māzīyār
Afsāne-ye Āfarīnesh (The Fable of Creation)

Travelogues
Esfahān Nesfe Jahān (Isfahan: Half the World)
Rū-ye Jādeh-ye Namnak (On the Wet Road), unpublished, written in 1935.

Studies, Criticism and Miscellanea
Rubaiyat-e Hakim Umar-e Khayyam (Khayyam's Quatrains) 1923
Ensan va Hayvan (Man and Animal) 1924
Marg (Death) 1927
Favayed-e Giyahkhari (The Advantages of Vegetarianism) 1927
Hekayat-e Ba Natijeh (The Story with a Moral) 1932
Taranehha-ye Khayyam (The Melodies of Khayyam) 1934
Chaykuvski (Tchaikovsky) 1940
Dar Piramun-e Lughat-e Fārs-e Asadi (About Asadi's Persian Dictionary) 1940
Shiveh-ye Novin dar Tahqiq-e Adabi (A New Method of Literary Research) 1940
Dāstan-e Naz (The Story of Naz) 1941
Shivehha-ye Novin Dar She'r-e Parsi (New Trends in Persian Poetry) 1941
A review of the film Mulla Nasru'd Din 1944
A literary criticism on the Persian translation of Gogol's The Government Inspector 1944
Chand Nukteh Dar Bar-ye Vis va Ramin (Some Notes on Vis and Ramin) 1945
Payam-e Kafka (The Message of Kafka) 1948
al-Be`thatu-Islamiya Ellal-Belad'l Afranjiya (An Islamic Mission in the European Lands), undated.

Translations
1950 The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka (along with Hasan Ghaemian)
1931 Gooseberries by Anton Chekhov
Pahlavi language translations:
1943 Karname Ardashir-e-Papakan
1940 Gojaste Abalish
1945 Amadan-e Shah Bahram-e Varjavand (Return of King Bahram Varjavand)
1944 Zand va Homan Yasn

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The Blind Owl

The Blind Owl (1937) (in Persian: بوف کور Boof-e koor) is Sadegh Hedayat's most enduring work of prose and a major literary work of 20th century Iran. Written in Persian, it tells the story of an unnamed pen case painter, the narrator, who sees in his macabre, feverish nightmares that "the presence of death annihilates all that is imaginary. We are the offspring of death and death delivers us from the tantalizing, fraudulent attractions of life; it is death that beckons us from the depths of life. If at times we come to a halt, we do so to hear the call of death... throughout our lives, the finger of death points at us." The narrator addresses his murderous confessions to the shadow on his wall resembling an owl. His confessions do not follow a linear progression of events and often repeat and layer themselves thematically, thus lending to the open-ended nature of interpretation of the story.

Iraj Bashiri, one of the two English translators of The Blind Owl, comments about the atmosphere of Hedayat's works: "The translation and the analysis of the works of Sadeq Hedayat occupied me for over ten years. That was some twenty years ago. It is wonderful that time heals what Times bring us. Otherwise, life itself would become the burden Hedayat speaks about. Hedayat's is a dark world when you are in it. It haunts you for some time after you leave it. Eventually, however, it leaves you alone, if you leave it alone."

The Blind Owl was written during the oppressive latter years of Reza Shah's rule (1925—1941). It was originally published in a limited edition in Bombay, during Hedayat's year-long stay there in 1937, stamped with "Not for sale or publication in Iran." It first appeared in Tehran in 1941 (as a serial in the daily Iran), after Reza Shah's abdication, and had an immediate and forceful effect.

Translations

The Blind Owl was translated into French by Roger Lescot during World War II, apparently with Hedayat's knowledge and approval, and published as La Chouette Aveugle (1953), and later by Pasteur Vallery Radot, a member of the French Academy. The book was well received in the French literary circles. It has been known to make its readers suicidal, hence the banning in Iran.

In Germany, two translations appeared in the early 1960s. The first, entitled Die Blinde Eule, was translated by Heshmat Moayyed, Otto H. Hegel and Ulrich Riemerschmidt directly from the Persian; the second, in East Germany, was translated by Gerd Henniger from the French version.

The Blind Owl was translated into English by D.P. Costello (1957), by Henry D. G. Law, and by Iraj Bashiri (1974).

In Poland The Blind Owl was translated from the Persian original by late specjalist in Iranian studies, Barbara Majewska, Ph.D. It appeared under the same-meaning title "Ślepa sowa" twice. First in the respectable literary quarterly „Literatura na Świecie” (No 10(90), Warszawa, October 1978, pp. 4-116); then as a separate book (Warszawa, 1979).

In Romania, The Blind Owl was translated from Persian into Romanian in 1996 by the orientalist philologist Gheorghe Iorga, under the title Bufniţa neagră. A revised second edition came out in 2006.

In Urdu the novel has been translated by Ajmal Kamal with the original name Boof-e-Kor. Many of Hedayat's short stories have also been translated into Urdu, mostly by Bazl-e-Haq Mahmood, who published one volume of his short stories as Sag-e-Awara (Sag-e Velgard).

In India, two translations appeared in the Malayalam language. The first, entitled Kurudan Moonga, was translated by the famous novelist Vilasini. The second, entitled Kurudan Kooman was translated by S. A. Qudsi and published by Mathrubhumi Books in 2005.

Quotations

(from the Iraj Bashiri translation [1])

I passed through many streets and distraughtly walked by the rabble who, with greedy faces, were in pursuit of money and last. In fact, I did not need to see them to know them; one was enough to represent the rest. They were all like one big mouth leading to a wad of guts, terminating in a sexual organ.
In life there are certain sores that, like a canker, gnaw at the soul in solitude and diminish it. (opening line)
I write only for my shadow which is cast on the wall in front of the light. I must introduce myself to it.
In this base world, full of poverty and misery, for the first time I thought a ray of sunshine had shone on my life. But alas, it was not a sunbeam, rather it was only a transient beam, a shooting star, which appeared to me in the likeness of a woman or an angel.
I was not in full control of myself, and it seemed that I knew her name from before. The evil in her eyes, her color, her scent and her movements were all familiar to me. It was as though my souls, in the life before this, in the world of imagination, had bordered on her soul and that both souls, of the same essence and substance, were destined for union. I must have lived this life very close to her. I had no desire to touch her; the invisible beams that emanated from our bodies and mingled were sufficient for me. Isn't this terrifying experience which seemed so familiar to met quite the same as the feelings of two lovers who feel that they have known each other before and that a mysterious relationship has previously existed between them? Was it possible that someone else could affect me? The dry, repulsive and ominous laughter of the old man, however, tore our bonds asunder.
I was growing inward incessantly; like an animal that hibernates during the wintertime, I could hear other peoples' voices with my ears; my own voice, however, I could hear only in my throat. The loneliness and the solitude that lurked behind me were like a condensed, thick, eternal night, like one of those nights with a dense, persistent, sticky darkness which waits to pounce on unpopulated cities filled with lustful and vengeful dreams.
What relationship could exist between the lives of the fools and healthy rabble who were well, who slept well, who performed the sexual act well, who had never felt the wings of death on their face every moment—what relationship could exist between them and one like me who has arrived at the end of his rope and who knows that he will pass away gradually and tragically?
What is love? For the rabble love is a kind of variety, a transient vulgarity; the rabble's conception of love is best found in their obscene ditties, in prostitution and in the foul idioms they use when they are halfway sober, such as "shoving the donkey's foreleg in mud," or "putting dust on the head." My love for her, however, was of a totally different kind. I knew her from ancient times—strange slanted eyes, a narrow, half-open mouth, a subdued quiet voice. She was the embodiment of all my distant, painful memories among which I sought what I was deprived of, what belonged to me but somehow I was denied. Was I deprived forever?
My life appeared to me as unnatural, uncertain and incredible as the design on the pencase I am using at this moment. It seems that a painter who has been possessed, perhaps a perfectionist, has painted the cover of this pencase. Often, when I look at this design, it seems familiar; perhaps it is because of this design that I write or perhaps this design makes me write.
Finally I realized that I was a demi-god and that I was beyond all the low, petty desires of mankind. I felt the eternal flux within me. What is eternity? Eternity for me was playing hide-and-seek with that whore on the banks of the Suren river; it was a momentary closing of my eyes when I hid my head in her lap.